Hello everyone, and welcome, to the Football Manager 2012 blogs. This year we’ll have a selection of written blogs and video blogs to show you many of the new features that are in this years’ forthcoming release.

You’ll be able to find each of the blogs at community.sigames.com in English, and they’ll also appear in local languages at our many partner sites, including marca.com (Spain), sofoot.fr (France), 442 (Australia), http://corrieredellosport.it (http://corrieredellosport.it/) (Italy), bold.dk (Denmark), sporx.com (Turkey)

To see the initial FM 2012 feature announcements, you can find them at www.footballmanager.com (http://www.footballmanager.com/), but we’ll be going into more detail with the blogs here.

Today’s is about changes and new features regarding youth players and “newgens” which are the players that come into the game over time to ensure that there are a stream of players available for your whole career.

We often talk about how FM 2012 is part evolution for the series, and part revolution. So let’s start out with some revolution…

In previous editions of the Football Manager series, you didn’t have much control over the youth squad. Each year you’d find a bunch of players dumped into your youth squad at the start of the season. Not any more.

With FM 2012, we’ve given you more control over which players make it into your youth squad. Towards the end of the domestic season, you’ll get a news item in your inbox to inform you that your youth candidates are now ready to be assessed. Your coaches will already have assessed them and will be able to give you a scouting report for each one, as well as your assistant making recommendations to you on who you should, or shouldn’t, give a youth contract to.

Your staff will also arrange a match between your current youth squad, and the youth candidates so you can watch them in action, and you can also choose to have a further look at the players by allowing them to play in normal youth team matches for the few weeks when you are making your decisions on who to take on.

They are initially treated as an extra squad, so it’s easy to see who they are and scroll through them using quick flicks. After the youth candidates have played their evaluation match against your current youth team, they will stay on with your youth team as trialists for the following few weeks.

It’s a whole new level of control for those of you who want to micromanage to the lowest level– but as we know that this isn’t something that everyone will want to do, we’ve also made it so that your assistant can look after who to take on if you don’t want to go this in depth alongside the other things that you can ask your assistant to look after, such as team talks and press conferences.

One thing that we always need to balance when we’re adding in new features is that people play the game in different ways.

We know that some people will love the extra control on youth teams. But we also know that some people don’t bother with youth squads at all, just signing ready made players from other teams in the game. There are also many who manage at a lower level, and struggle to balance their finances between having a youth squad and the needs of the first team.

So we have an option for those people too.

So, for them, you can now ask your board to scrap your youth set up entirely. This will mean no new players coming through, and no need to try and get wages together to pay for the youth team. Your board may so no, of course, but if they’re looking to save money too, then it’s likely they’ll say yes.

There have also been improvements in the way that the newgens are generated, with country based positional “traits” now being used. In Brazil, for example, it’s rare that they have natural wingers in real life, with those players more likely to be wing backs, so you’ll see less Brazilian newgen wingers, and more Brazilian newgen wing backs.

The same can also be said of a players mental attributes. Players in Brazil, due to the way they grow up playing the game, are more likely to have flair. Players in Spain are more likely to play a short passing game. All of these traits are now reflected better in game.

We’ve also improved the way youth recruitment works at different clubs for their youth setup. The club’s youth recruitment network and youth facilities are not only linked to the quality of newgens produced by the youth setup, but also the scope of the recruitment. So clubs with excellent recruitment networks and state-of-the art facilities have the ability to attract youth players not just from the local regions, but from other continents as well.

There’s also been a big improvement in the way names are generated for all youth players, particularly in countries where there are lots of regions and names tend to be region specific.

So that’s it for the youth & newgens blog – there are many other improvements in this area too, but we’ll let you discover those for yourself when you’re playing Football Manager 2012 later in the year

You can discuss this blog at http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/274691-Official-Blog-Feedback-youth-amp-newgens